The third large body of research and theory that this dissertation draws on is work on identity and identification. Specifically, the project views identity as flexible and ever-changing, as well as non-essential, to demonstrate how discourses around gender and gaming are also non- essential. Although exclusionary forces work to maintain gaming’s core as limited to specific kinds of games and gamers, identity theories demonstrate how it is actually a process- and performance-based means for creating an in-group and an out-group.
Beginning with a cultural theory approach to identity, “the concept of identity deployed here is therefore not an essentialist, but a strategic and positional one… identities are never unified and, in late modern times, increasingly fragmented and fractured; never singular but multiply constructed across different, often intersecting and antagonistic discourses, practices and positions” (Hall, 1996c, p. 17). In other words, cultural theorists like Hall argue people are made up of a wide variety of different identity components rather than a single unified self.
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Furthermore, they have the ability to draw on these different aspects and prioritize individual identity components separately depending on the situation they are in. While this allows people to adapt their self-presentation to different situations, it can at times also complicate matters. Specifically, this occurs because identities and identity components are not entirely internally formed. Rather, they are influenced both by the individual crafting the identity and by outside forces such as representation, social norms, and power structures. This sometimes means that an individual’s identity components do not fit together neatly. As Hall elaborates in a separate piece, “within us are contradictory identities, pulling in different directions, so that our identifications are continuously being shifted about” (Hall, 1996b, p. 598).
When an individual is engaging in the process of identifying who they are and how to communicate that self to others, the process we call identification, representation and cultural conceptions play a significant role by showing them potential identities they could embody and how these fit into different social situations and norms. Scholars like Hall (1996a) argue that the world is continually understood and defined not simply through reality, which is too large for an individual to process in its entirety, but through the interplay of representation and lived reality. Hall describes these two factors as “mutually constitutive”; that is, what exists in reality
influences and affects the representations that we see in media, but the trends that appear in media in turn influence how people perceive reality. In other words, the way in which an individual can envision and define themselves is at least partially related to the way in which they see people like themselves represented both in media and in cultural associations with media. “Media representation makes certain identities possible, plausible, and livable” (Shaw, 2014a, p. 67).
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vacuum. Rather, they reflect existing systems of power and control, which often work to exclude people from identities that they desire or to complicate their relationship with their existing identity. In terms of video games, this means that the consistent representation of gamers as men in news, marketing, and other media presents for men a simple point of identification where they can plausibly see themselves as taking on the identity of a gamer. This same representational trend can exclude women by making their connection to that identity harder to envision. For instance, a woman who plays games frequently, has a long history with gaming, and who enjoys both games themselves and discussions about them may self-identify as a gamer, as many participants in this study did. However, continually seeing largely male representations of players can indicate that she does not fit the socially constructed idea of what a gamer is; she may struggle to reconcile her gender identity and her gamer identity. In other words, and drawing on the work of Foucault, the discourses around gaming and gamers allow limited subject positions (Foucault, 1982; Hall, 1997). Masculinized subject positions make more sense than feminized ones when interpreting the meanings, power, and management of gaming, and therefore are easier to embody.
Limited or exclusionary representations can also affect overall relationships with media. For instance, in Linda Williams’ (1984) analysis of the movie Stella Dallas, she argues that women’s relation to media and representation is deeply affected by their position as women, and therefore as audiences that are often tangential to the concerns of media industries. She points out the many ways in which movies, among other media, leave women little space to identify with protagonists and narratives that are not made for them. When women are addressed, media messages for them are mixed and often contradictory (Douglas, 1994, p. 9). Because of this, Williams argues, women have developed different forms of identification than men; specifically,
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they have developed the ability to identify with multiple characters at once, or as Douglas describes it, “to identify with ambivalence itself” (1994, p. 74). Williams sees this reflected in the structure of media made for women, such as soap operas, arguing that “The very form of soap opera encourages identification with multiple points of view. At one moment, female viewers identify with a woman united with her lover, at the next with the sufferings of her rival” (1984, p. 17). Her own analysis of Stella Dallas shows that the viewer is meant to identify simultaneously with Stella, her daughter Laurel, and even her rival Helen, understanding the struggles and triumphs of each at the same time. This process of multiple identification, however, is not always easy to maintain. Trying to reconcile different identity components, choose which aspect to identify with in which circumstances, and navigate the social norms around each requires real work, and can leave individuals exhausted. Moments where they fail to present their identity properly can also incite backlash.
Finally, cultural theories of identity argue that a lack of representation or limited
representations of certain groups connects to socio-political power, in that unrepresented groups struggle to connect to others like them, to pursue broader socio-cultural recognition as a
meaningful identity group, and to turn that recognition into political representation and power. Because of this, researchers and activists argue the need for diverse representations, so that different identities and ways of being can be made possible. Media representations can help individuals develop a connection to a particular identity, which can then help them publicly express solidarity and a call for recognition. As Mary Gray (2009) points out in discussing LGBT visibility movements, “LGBT Lobby Day events are quintessential examples of how a politics of visibility can work as a political force in public life. Private citizens coalesce as a community of LGBT people at these events to demonstrate their strength in numbers. Together,
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they seek to effect change through a public call for social recognition and equal representation” (p. 2). By making identities plausible, representation can make them powerful.
One weakness of these identity theories, pointed out and addressed by feminist theorist and particularly women of color feminist scholars, is that they posit identity as contextual and flexible, but still connected to a real-world referent, an existing identity that needs representation and that can be represented. Feminist theorists like Judith Butler and Donna Haraway, however, argued that this perspective can limit both representation and power by requiring individuals to define themselves as subjects. “The domains of political and linguistic ‘representation’ set out in advance the criterion by which subjects themselves are formed, with the result that representation is extended only to what can be acknowledged as a subject. In other words, the qualifications for being a subject must first be met before representation can be extended” (Butler, 1999, p. 4). The challenge of this is that, in constituting who a subject is, one is also constituting who a subject is
not, making subjecthood an inherently exclusionary practice.
To undermine this, scholars like Butler, Haraway, and Chela Sandoval argued that identity was not related to a preexisting “real” identity, but rather constituted through
performance and through collective social work or identity labor (Gray, 2009, p. 21). From this perspective, politics of visibility, resting on increased representation of different identities, was insufficient for altering political power structures because it necessarily required exclusion and the limitation of “identity” to a partial representation. As Haraway points out, drawing on Sandoval’s call for a woman of color consciousness, “The category ‘woman’ negated all non- white women; ‘black’ negated all non-black people, as well as all black women. But there was also no ‘she’, no singularity, but a sea of differences among US women who have affirmed their historical identity as US women of color. This identity marks out a self-consciously constructed
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space that cannot affirm the capacity to act on the basis of natural identification, but only on the basis of conscious coalition, of affinity, of political kinship” (2000, p. 296). Sandoval posited that politics require conscious recognition of similarities and shared goals, rather than reliance on identity and the visibility of that identity as a means for progress.
Drawing on both cultural theories and more specific feminist approaches simultaneously, this dissertation argues that discourse, and how an identity is constructed through its
representation and through conversations around it, does still matter to individual experiences. This is not because it is a natural, essential referent to a real-life entity, but because participants often have to choose how they intend to self-present, and the possible representations offered to them can aid or limit them in this process. A diverse set of representations offers more potential identifications to draw on than a highly limited one. Furthermore, discourse works to structure certain subject positions as logical and available; “the discourse itself produces ‘subjects’— figures who personify the particular forms of knowledge which the discourse produces…. But the discourse also produces a place for the subject… from which its particular knowledge or meaning most makes sense (Hall, 1997, p. 56). Cultural constructions of gaming as masculine, evidence from participants shows, complicates women’s engagement with games and game spaces, as well as the subject positions they take on while navigating these areas.
At the same time, viewing identity as non-essential provides an entryway through which the historical construction of games as masculine can be questioned and subverted. By analyzing gaming through the lens of “core”, meaning through the lens of in- and out-groups and the forces deployed to maintain these, it is possible to show how marginalization is a continual, flexible process. In her research on how rural LGBT individuals navigate their identity, Gray (2009) wrote about identity as work, arguing, “The authenticity of identity from this perspective reads as
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an ongoing, at times exhausting, dialogue rather than a reflection of reality. It refuses the inclination to be lodged in a singular person, place, or thing” (p. 26). Similarly, female gamers’ simultaneous desire for a gamer identity and rejection of many aspects of that identity reveals identity itself to be partial and contested. This undermines gaming’s masculinized history at the same time that it demonstrates its continued problems with misogyny and sexism. It also calls for a recognition that, in masculinized or otherwise exclusionary spaces, moving beyond dualisms or referential identities may be key to true understanding of these areas.